Your Refuge in the Night
by burninganchors
Summary: With nowhere else to go and no one left who understands, Sherlock keeps in touch with a scattered few over the time he is chasing down the last of Moriarty's web and they are fighting their own battles back home.
1. Come Home

**_Fic_:** Your Refuge in the Night  
><strong><em>Rating<em>:** PG15 (future references to drugs, violence, sex, etc)  
><strong><em>Summary<em>:** With nowhere else to go and no one left who understands, Sherlock keeps in touch with a scattered few over the time he is chasing down the last of Moriarty's web and they are fighting their own battles back home.  
><strong><em>Additional Notes<em>:** This is going to be a series of ficlets connected under the premise up there, focusing on the relationship between Sherlock and various characters over the three-year period between Reichenbach and Sherlock's return. No particular chronology, sporadic updates, etc, etc. Hope you enjoy! Title is from "Please Come Back Home" by Erik Bledsoe.

* * *

><p><em>Come Home - Molly<em>

Sherlock steps into the safe house Molly has set up for him while he's back in London. The first thing he notices is that it's damp, and the floors creak whenever he crosses the threshold, but he's only planning on staying long enough to catch a particularly vicious con artist that hadn't left the city when his master did. Then it'll be on to the next one - the next criminal, the next hunt, the next city, until there are no more to hunt and no more places to hide.

It's been months already, but it shows no sign of stopping; this vicious cycle spins on, the web thickens and twists, and sometimes he wonders if this was the right choice. Particularly now that he is here, the place where he began, and now that he has seen...

His eyes squeeze shut, but the data doesn't delete. Can't. He's learned in the trying. Some things were too strong for even his powerful mind. Some things fell into the deep spaces and never were able to find their way out. Some fell, and were held there, protected in the dark by forces he couldn't himself begin to explain.

When his eyes open, it's to hear the door knob jiggling as a key twists in the lock. There's only a moment of fear, when he forgets that no one knows him anymore and wonders how they could have possibly found him so fast when _I was so careful, so very careful_ - but Molly appears in the crease of the door as it opens, and he relaxes as she closes it and turns slowly to face him for the first time in four months.

For a moment they stand there in the dim light of the hallway, sizing one another up. Even in the dark, they note the changes - she's let her hair grow long; a new tan sits uncomfortably on his face; all the little details that mark their time apart. They are abruptly struck by how real all of this suddenly seems, and the long days rest more heavily in that moment upon their shoulders than they ever have before. But still, they don't speak of it.

At last, she breathes a heavy sigh. "It's good to see you, again." She takes a step forward, then hesitates, her arms raised just slightly. She lowers them awkwardly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear instead, and instead gestures into what he assumes is the living room.

"Is it -"

"It's good to see you, too," he finally says, haltingly, and she jumps a little in surprise at the unexpected interruption.

A tense smile flashes on her face, but it's gone in an instant, and as the light of it fades from her features Sherlock is struck by how tired she looks. Things that were easy to miss in the first once-over when he was so weary himself, but things even she's been working to hide. But not from him - deep circles ring her red eyes, and her gait is shuffling as she starts forward into the living room. All signs of sleep deprivation and deep emotional stress, but he does not understand, why, when she has been here all this time and just keeping a secret at most -

"Is it alright?" she begins again, patting one of the mildewing pillows. Dust or worse rises into the air, and she teeters backwards, turning an apologetic eye in his direction. "I couldn't find much better on such short notice, and we're running out of funds as it is..." She trails off, looking as lost as her words as she stands in the middle of the empty room, the scent of dust and decay all around her. He narrows his eyes, deep concentration settling into the wrinkles of his forehead as he gives a passing, distracted nod and devotes his attention instead to the woman who he has known for so long, and really never known at all, for all his deductions and intelligence.

After a few moments of this strained silence, she gives a weak laugh. "Sherlock, why're you staring at me? Not enough people to deduce in your travels?"

"Plenty," he replies, and for a moment they're both shocked at how raspy his voice sounds, vocal chords unused to the extended conversation. He clears his throat. "Plenty of people." _Just none that counted. None I... none I care..._

His face remains unreadable, and it's up to her to abandon the subject and instead pull a packet from the bag at her side. She hands it over the coffee table in the center of the room, and he sits down with it on the opposite sofa. "I got the information you asked for on Andrews. You should be able to... uh, get him tomorrow. There are also train tickets; you should head to Belgium for Morgan, who's next on the list. It leaves at eight, so you're sort of on a time limit..." While she speaks, Sherlock rifles through the file. Pictures of his target, schedule, profile - his eyes widen fractionally. She's done her homework. Much more than asked.

He looks up, but she's still rattling off instructions that he's only half-listening to. It's all in the file, anyway.

"...you'll want to get the hotel number, too, I don't think we're going to be able to get you a house while you're there -"

He's flipping through directions to Andrews' place of work when two photos slip out from the bottom and flutter gently to his lap. He picks them up, peers closer. Almost drops them again.

His jaw works. No sound escapes, and to his ears her voice seems glaringly loud in the dark and empty room as it rises over the sudden pounding in his ears. "Molly," he manages at last, and it comes out a whisper. She stops instantly nonetheless, and her eyes immediately go to the two Polaroids in his hand.

John, _glorious, unforgettable_ John - at lunch in a cafe, his eyes downcast under the harsh afternoon light as he hunches over his food. John, again, blurry but visible - _it's him, really him, god, how is it_ - as he shuffles down one of London's many streets. And Sherlock can read it all, just as clearly as he ever was able; the limp in his leg and the strain in his shoulder, the pain and loss in his haunted eyes that he never could quite hide. Not from him, nothing from him. To Sherlock, John was an open book, and as his thumb ghosts over the gloss he realizes how much a tragedy their narrative has become. How fiercely he dares to hope for a better conclusion at the end of its pages; one that does not leave them as irreparably shattered as this broken man who stares up at him from the photographs seems to be.

Her dark gaze slides back to his, and in the silence that seems to be their mode of functioning, they regard one another.

And abruptly, in the moments it takes him to fly over her sad face, he knows the cause behind her lowered eyelids; understands the pale cast to her skin and the wan tint of her lips. He is destroying an empire, but she is picking up the pieces of the destruction he left behind. And it is much harder to put something together than it is to break it.

"Molly," he says again, and it's a revelation in the air, a breath of wonder and a praise and a mourner's lament all in one. Molly did not attend his funeral, he knows, if only because they cannot rest in peace themselves until it is all finished. Here, clothed in the black of this wretched, forgotten flat, and away from the prying eyes of the public, they do their mourning - in the seconds it takes for Molly to slide a hand over the fist he has clenched at the edges of the photographs, until his fingers relax and he expels a breath he did not realize he had been holding.

"It's just - just in case you ever need a reason."

He swallows, nods fractionally. Does not meet her eyes again. "Thank you." It's for more than the reason, though he does not tell her just how much lately he's been needing a reason.

She stands, hand withdrawing, and the centimeters between them are almost desperate as they move towards the door. There's a wealth of words in that quiet space, and another touch that could be delivered just so. Enough to sustain. Just enough, until the end. But they are not those people. She is not the young, naive girl who had pined after him for years, and he is not the detective who dismissed and manipulated her for his own ends. She is much more careful with her heart after all that she has seen, and his is somewhere outside his body, now, sitting in an empty flat, making tea and reading or blogging or whatever it was John did without him these days. No, they are these people, now, who will not allow themselves to break so far before the finish. There is work to be done.

But it's enough, to share their deep even breaths, and feel the warmth brought by the truth of their cause in the shadowed figure of the only other one who knows. A certain comfort, and a weight, that brings them down to earth and focuses them on a path that is so easy to lose, in the many miles between his cities and the many smiles she sends a broken man who can never quite smile back.

There is so much they are waiting for, but they are strong enough to see it through.

She leaves, but that weight does not. It's just another added burden that sends a tired shudder through his limbs as he starts upstairs to catch a bare hour of sleep before it all begins again. Their vicious cycle, their rising action, the long journey that lay ahead for impossible distances - but had an end in sight.

Yet as he passes the kitchen on his way up, weak moonlight filtering through the shabby curtains, it becomes a little closer. A red flower, fresh and still just barely glistening with dew, sits on the table, a splash of color in a cold, dark place. The two pictures lie side by side, and just at their edges, a crumpled piece of paper.

In crisp, neat handwriting - trembling just slightly, but he knows it through its twists and curves as one he's seen on many autopsies, and he will not forget it even now - the words curve over the center.

_"Come home."_

He heaves a sudden sigh, as something low and deep stirs within him at the words. A craving, an urge; a longing he has never felt while in the city he calls home. But maybe it's because it's not home, if home lies somewhere in that flat with that man, and not these mere, agonizing miles away. And oh, if only it were that easy, to cross those distances and find the solace he's been chasing with a gun in his hand and determination in his eyes.

And yet, her unshakable faith reminds him of another who had always believed in him. And because they deserve something for it - they all, every single figure who still cries out to him in his nightmares and whose threads he still feels tugging on the ache inside his chest - and maybe because he wants to feel that, too, he takes a pen from his coat pocket and scrawls a message back.

_"I'm trying."_

It's the least he can do, but somehow, he feels that this too, will be enough. Enough for the people who do not rest until the work is done. Who cannot truly come home until it is over.

Enough for those who have a reason - a renewed reason, that sings fresh in his mind as he sleeps his first dreamless sleep in weeks - to fight.


	2. It's Over

_And in this one, Sherlock turns to an old acquaintance, who has a habit of eclipsing and predominating expectations..._

* * *

><p><em>It's Over - Irene<em>

The light spilling from the open window is a beacon to the darkened streets. That small pinprick of light, which throws itself over the small cottages and is lost in the crevices between each house and swallowed by the darkness of the pastures between each. Glitters weakly in the distant city that reflects the light back; back toward this dark and sleepy village that time has forgotten.

A shadow moves. Detaches itself from the surrounding dark and creeps along the rows of closed blooms creeping along the cobblestone paths. Forms itself into a man as the figure steps into the path and is bathed in light, just a silhouette on the street - tall, black, and defeated. His shoulders slump, and he's favoring an arm, but the hard line of his jaw as it tilts toward the open window is determined, and if the night were not so complete, one could see the way his eyes glint even in their burdened depths.

A figure passes the window overhead, cutting off the light. He lurches back into the dark just as the person - a woman - steps to the sill. Her long, dark hair fans out over the flower box, mixing with the heather as the summer night breeze tangles them together. Her eyes - unmistakable in their bright blue depths (so vivid even under the purpling sky) - gaze out over the empty fields, contemplation a mask settling onto the smooth skin of her face. For long moments, she hovers, almost seeming to wait for something, the only movement her steady blinks and shifting hair.

At last, she draws the curtains, red nails flashing against the sheer fabric before the lights are extinguished and the night goes completely black.

He exhales long and slow, and almost starts forward -

- but at the last moment, he turns himself down the road and walks away, growing dimmer until he's enveloped by the cool airs of night.

The woman - _the_ woman - stares at his retreating form through the gap in the shades, and exhales her own shaky sigh, the fast patter of her heart in her ears belying any calm her impassive face might betray. Should have known; did, really, just a hypothesis, but now confirmed in the flesh.

Quickly, as she slides down the wall and stares into the distance while her mind whirs with facts and feeling all together; all at once, she comes to the conclusion that she needs more data and will do whatever it takes to get it.

As any scientist knew, one trial was never enough. No, but this time she would set the conditions, let their brains reach their conclusions, and, like all scientists, find the truth.

* * *

><p>Despite everything, she finds him.<p>

A small French town, not far from the one where she's been hiding out. It'd been a fun little game, ditching the Witness Protection agents, though she's still not quite sure how to get back out from this one - never mind, she'll think of something, always does. That was their curse; always thinking, always always _always_ awake eyes wide open, open as their minds, and oh so ready for the next move until suddenly, abruptly, there isn't one.

She knows how he feels - _ha! how he _feels_, and shouldn't she get a right kick out of that _- and that is what counts here.

He's sequestered himself in the dingy corners of a coffee shop that's only a few hours from closing as the evening sets in, heavy and thick in the summer. She finds him - actually _finds_ him, alive,_ flesh blood bone breath alive_ - surreptitiously curled into a chair and hunched over his laptop, tracking the movements of operatives and so completely absorbed that it takes him entire seconds to realize he's being watched.

Entire moments to realize who is doing the watching.

He merely blinks at the smirk sent his way, before tall heels come clicking down the stone floors and settle in the seat opposite, attached legs crossing over the cushions and attached body lounging backwards to signal the shop owners.

To be fair, the attached face has been changed since the last time he saw it, though that's a mark on his side as well. Her hair is bobbed around her angular face, and the colored contacts are a necessary precaution - boring brown, normal brown. She's left the business of making an impression based on looks alone, and no profile was always better - at least until things settled down. Then it was on to the next thing; making her next move and pulling the world along with her. Whatever she did, it was extraordinary.

But she thinks this man might have topped anything she could ever accomplish. He fooled the devil, and all his demons, too. She wonders, briefly, what that makes her.

The smirk has disappeared by the time he registers her presence fully. Instead, she's got her eyes trained on him with a calculating strength he's only ever seen directed back at him from a mirror. They're silent, even when the waiter sets a steaming mug before her, and their eyes do not stop in their sizing up. Drinking in the impossible on both sides.

But, as he was so awfully, endearingly fond of saying, only improbable.

At last her fingers, devoid of their blood red tips, curl around the cup until the knuckles turn white.

"Tell him," she says at last, those tailored words enunciated carefully and _planned_, devised for this very moment, as the right words that would jump straight to the heart of the issue and strike him where he needed to be struck, "you're alive."

His eyelids flutter shut for the briefest instant, and it's enough.

More silence, watching the curls of steam dissipate in the atmosphere, and then she says very quietly, less assured, now, "I knew."

"Of course you did." His voice surprises her. The French lilt matches the other modifications he's made since they last met, down to the artfully styled hair and the scar he's scoured across those delightful cheekbones. But it's more the way it comes out trembling, and raspy, as if unused to the words. Mere speech, then, or the conversation? His eyes were never a tell, because even in all his self-portraits of disguises, that simply was him, down to the core. Sherlock Holmes does not let anyone in lightly. But she knows that now he has paid the price, for there was only ever one who could slip into those myriad blues and greens and greys and find something of meaning, and for all their similarities, it was never her. "What tipped you off first? The swift cremation? Lack of open-casket service?" He fires off the questions, but she can tell his interest is only passing - their problems go beyond one another, now. There is much more at stake in the games they play in these troubled times.

"Sweetie," she chides gently, taking a slow whiff of her coffee. "You overestimate me." _Does that make me special?_ she'd once asked. But now, sitting across from a skeletal figure and an ashen face, she's not sure she wants the answer, even if she knows it already.

Nevertheless, that catches his attention. Those unreadable eyes narrow, focus in on her like a microscope's lens, and it's one of those rare, heady moments when she realizes just how intensely someone wants to take her apart in that moment and see how she ticks. Anywhere else, she'd be pleased at the power of it.

But he is her equal. And now, he is not less of a man for his confusion. And if anything, he is more human for all the months she can see weighing down on his troubled shoulders.

"Did you know what Molly liked?" he asks, and there's almost the tone of laughter in it.

Her eyebrow arches fractionally, and she does huff in amusement. "No, I don't think even I could get our little mouse to squeak. I used my own eyes for this one, love. Security footage, Jim's plans... a whole host of evidence to back me up." _What I hoped and feared, all at once_. "You'd be impressed. But that's not the point here, is it," she continues, settling against the curved armrest of her chair and resting her chin against her pale wrists. "We were talking about you and your pretty other half."

He does not seem to react, but she also doesn't miss the way his newly calloused hand clenches a fraction around the edge of his laptop. "No, I think _you_ were talking about that," he sighs eventually, closing the lid of the computer with a soft click as the screen goes dark.

"And in a conversation, generally it would be your turn to respond," she points out.

"Never was one for small talk."

"Ah, but don't you know?" Her lips quirk at one end, but instead of a smile the tilt of it is almost sad, as her eyes drink in the downcast face and tired circles and him, and make their own deductions. "This isn't small at all. This is the biggest thing of all, bigger and more important than I think even you know." A beat, and then, "And I think that scares you."

"And if it does?" He leans forward across the table, shadow long and lean as it covers her face. "Why should you care at all? You're always after something. Woman like you; likes her winning, oh, _yes_." A light flares briefly in his eyes, and gutters as he speaks. "You're here to pay back my favour."

"Good boy never misses a thing," the woman smiles, a quick, sharp flash of teeth that recalls the glint of the sword she'd almost died under, before it dies just as quickly. She drains her glass, and for once he does not see behind the rim the way her eyelids clench shut.

"You saved my life," she admits, when the empty cup has been settled on the expanse of wood between them, "and I don't like owing anyone anything."

"So you're here to save mine?" He seems dubious, and she can observe from the way his glance flickers to the window that he's already planning his escape. Or at least trying to make it seem so. She bets on the latter, but hurries on nonetheless.

"In effect, yes." She takes a deep breath, then speaks in a quiet, conspiratorial tone. "If I'm correct, which I know I am, then the reason you're frittering about Europe is because you're eliminating all the little flies in the spider's web." She doesn't wait for his confirmation, but derives a small satisfaction from the gentle incline of his head. "Now, I knew what a man at the records office liked, and it turns out he was one of your precious bugs. But he led me to the real goods." Her nose wrinkles. "Even if it wasn't real good."

He actually cracks a tiny smirk of his own at this. "Still up to your old tricks, then."

She smiles back; has the nerve (_always does_) to wink. "Old dog, sweetheart." She retrieves a file from the inside of her coat and pushes it across to him, sobering as she does so. "Your man goes by the name of Sebastian Moran, which I'm sure you're already aware of, smart man like you. But this is all the information and more. It'll get you to him, and once you've got him..." She spreads her palms wide. "It's over."

_Over. _He breathes the word, so quietly she would have missed it if she weren't watching his lips fall around the shape in a sort of prayer. The priest in his confessional, as if the tables have turned since their first meeting, she offers penance.

But his eyes are suspicious, as if her way out is too simple - and oh, that bastard Jim was right; everything always did need to be clever with this one. He was going to get himself killed that way. Shouldn't he know better? It almost had. And it almost had with her, too. Maybe they're just the people who never learn from their mistakes. Not because they're too fun to make, as mistakes often are, but because they know nothing else.

_Deduce the truth from me_, she says in her silence, staring solemnly back as the sun at last slips over the hills and the warning bell for closing time rings, _if you are so far gone that you can do nothing else, do this. _

And as they sit there in disguises meant to fool the world, neither of them are fool enough to fall for it. They see the portraits. As clearly as if those who thought photographs stole pieces of your soul were correct; she reads into the inky lines of suddenly bright blue eyes, and he maps the light that dances in hers, and they _know_.

For all their lies and deception, at their core they really are honest people. They don't lie to themselves, at least, and that is something. But even then... they both dare to hope.

* * *

><p>Repaying a favour, she'd told him, Irene recalls as his familiar form blends back into shadow and she realizes how unlikely it is that their paths will ever cross again.<p>

And it was true. She doesn't like owing anyone anything.

But she had owed herself this.

_Sentiment_, she thinks on an inhale, letting the world fill up her head as the air fills her lungs, crisp and with just the biting ache of a fall that is looming on their horizons. The trees shiver. She breathes. _A chemical defect_ -

But she hopes to god they win.


End file.
